If you were to drive from Barcaldine to Longreach to Winton, as I did recently, you would return fearing that the omnishambles of the Voice referendum will be joined in due course by the train wreck of truth telling.
Strung out over 200 kilometres in the middle of Queensland, the three towns are all history hotspots, and all three trade on the fact. Barcaldine’s big selling point is of course the Tree of Knowledge (now reduced, sadly, to the Stump of Knowledge) under which the Australian Labor Party is said to have been born. Longreach claims to be the birthplace of Qantas (known then as Queensland and Northern Territory Air Services) and has the Qantas Founders Museum in support; it is also home to that figure of legend, the Australian Stockman. Winton has Banjo Paterson and the composition of Waltzing Matilda, along with a counter-claim for Qantas. The three towns share the great shearers’ strikes of the early 1890s and associated drama, including the troops sent up from Brisbane to protect the scabs and defend the squatters (“Up came the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred/Down came the troopers one, two, three”).
Longreach does best at monetising (as the heirs to the squatters would say) this history. The Qantas Founders Museums offers Business, First and Captain’s Club tour packages for $99, $150 and $230 respectively; simple entry to the museum itself comes at $39. The Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame, boasting more than a million visitors since opening in 1988, does at least as well. The galleries-only option (each of ten galleries depicting “an important aspect of our pioneering history”) is only $40; the Stockman’s Experience Package covers the lot: galleries; a “fully immersive Cinematic Experience” that lets viewers “get in touch with the essence of the Australian stockman”; and the Show (actual sheep, dogs, horses, stockmen). It is $99, or $270 for two adults and two kids.
Longreach is bigger than Barcaldine and Winton combined and its two grand institutions tower over the region’s history industry. A total of 140-odd monuments, memorials, museums and the like range from The Drovers, a group of life-sized figures on Longreach’s main street, to Barcaldine’s 125th Anniversary of the Great Shearers’ Strikes monument to the Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton.
This ubiquitous public history is, however, less than comprehensive and very much less than candid. With the partial exception of the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame, on which more in a moment, none of those 140-odd markers records or even acknowledges, except in the most oblique way, that that there was a world before “settlement” or that it was swept away in the 1860s and 1870s when “explorers” and “pioneers” roamed around and across the country looking for “good land”; that the Queensland frontier was moving west at an estimated 300-plus kilometres a year; that this extraordinary movement was made possible by the efforts of the notorious Queensland Native Police and the “Queensland method” (pre-emptive eradication and intimidation as well as the more familiar reprisals); that these efforts were routinely supported and supplemented by squatters and station workers; that two of the many hundreds of massacres (the deliberate killing of five or more non-combatants) committed in Queensland were in the region, one of them, the infamous Skull Hole Massacre of 1870 costing 200 Aboriginal lives.
The sole exception to the rule — or partial exception — is the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. Its Songlines & Stock Routes Gallery deals with “the ways in which the adoption of Indigenous pathways into the present-day stock route system have most likely occurred,” thereby “grounding” its storytelling “in deep-time, linking the past to the present, and paying respect to Australia’s First Peoples.” Particularly notable is an account of the role of Aboriginal stockwomen in the pastoral industry “as told by Koa stockwoman, mother and Doctor of Philosophy” Tauri Simone.
But “Songlines & Stock Routes” is only one of ten galleries, scarcely proportionate to the realities of the pastoral industry. There is no indication of how the world of songlines was replaced by the social order of the stock route. Nor in this peak institution of memory in a region strongly identified with the pastoral industry and its industrial history is there any mention of two historic industrial actions by stockmen, the longest-ever Australian strike (in the Pilbara, 1946–49), and the Wave Hill walk-off (1966). Might that be because the strikers weren’t just “stockmen” as stockmen are assumed to be in the Stockman’s Hall of Fame? The strikers were Aboriginal stockmen.
Even the historian often accused of propagating rather than documenting the Australian Legend does better than this. Writing sixty-odd years ago, just as the great Australian silence was beginning to crack, Russel Ward insisted that the typical Australian bush-worker was no “noble being sans peur et sands reproche” — he was, among other things, “callously brutal to the Aborigines to whom he owed so much of his knowledge of the country,” and an habitual abuser of Aboriginal women.
If a “detailed analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum and related social and political attitudes” is to be believed, truth-telling will be a lay down misère. The referendum vote, this ANU study finds, “did not signal a lack of support for reconciliation, for the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders having a say in matters that affect them, for truth-telling processes, or for a lack of pride in First Nations cultures”; in fact “all of these notions were supported by around eight-in-ten Australians, or even more.” The “vast majority,” we are assured, “think that the federal government should help reconciliation and roughly the same number (80.5 per cent) think that Australia should undertake formal truth-telling processes to acknowledge the reality of Australia’s shared history” (emphasis added).
In which case, what to make of the public history of Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton — a total of 140 installations in three history-conscious towns, many installed during the past three or four decades of noisy recovery of “the reality of Australia’s shared history,” none of which, with a single and partial exception, make any reference to those recovered stories?
And what to make of the fact that Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton are by no means chalk to Australia’s cheese? Australia now has something like 41,000 monuments, plaques, memorials and the like, many of them (as in Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton) installed over the decades of intense “truth-telling” by thousands of Aboriginal people in evidence to royal commissions, commissions of inquiry, courts of law and land claim hearings as well as in biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, these many tellings backed up by the work of hundreds of historians — and yet only a handful of our 41,000 markers of memory refer to Indigenous place, people or events, with only a fraction of that handful referring to conflict between black and white, of which a yet-smaller fraction refer to the long history of violent conflict?
As the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner put it when he named the great Australian silence, “inattention on such scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness.” But what can it be explained by? There are some clues in the Voice vote and in the ANU study. Voters who opposed the Voice were more likely to be older men, to have “low levels of education,” to live in low-income households and to live outside the capital cities. They voted No, they told the survey, because “they didn’t want division” and because they “remain sceptical” of rights for some Australians that are not held by others. In other words, many No voters didn’t and don’t understand who the Aboriginal peoples are or the history that produced them. That at least some of these voters would accept “formal truth-telling processes” is no real surprise. Truth-telling processes in some distant place have come and gone; why worry about another one?
But this is speculation. Whatever the reasoning, the fact remains that decades of truth-telling have had little or no impact at all in an entire realm of story-telling and history production. What is the point of more truth-telling? It’s not more telling that we need. It’s more listening, learning, thinking, discussing and acting upon. We can hope that those “formal truth-telling processes” now under way in several capital cities will deliver long-denied reparations and treaties, which would be no small thing, but as vehicles of a substantial shift in our default view of ourselves and our story they will be water off the proverbial duck’s back.
What would or might work? Certainly not telling the recalcitrants that this time they “must listen to the historical truths told by First Nations people” as two academics recently demanded. In my book Telling Tennant’s Story I suggested a national project to encourage and support towns and communities to work with Indigenous people and local and professional historians to audit the public telling of their story and decide whether and how it might be more fully and truthfully told. Such grassroots work would not be an alternative to revamping peak institutions such as the Australian War Memorial (now entrusted to that amiable temporiser Kim Beazley); it would be a crucial complement to it.
That idea still seems to be worth considering, but with Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton freshly in mind, here are some suggestions about rules of engagement.
First: remember that the story is not simply or only one of violence, conflict and destruction, although it certainly includes all of those. Somewhere in the vicinity of even the worst moments will almost always be found white support, kindness, even resistance to what was being done to the Aboriginal peoples. Don’t demonise.
But don’t sentimentalise either, as Stanner reminded his comrade-in-arms Nugget Coombs. Those brutal killers of the Queensland Native Police (for example) were Aboriginal men, coopted, often coerced, always led, paid and supplied by the Europeans and their government, engaged to kill those who were to them “foreigners,” but brutal killers of tens of thousands of people nonetheless.
Third rule: don’t diminish the Man from Snowy River and its myriad equivalents, but do as Russell Ward did, in his time and in his way: expand and complicate the story, and distinguish between mythology and history.
Fourth: no holier-than-thou history! No enlightened present condescending (as E.P. Thomson put it) to the benighted past — a certain route to the misrepresentation of both.
And perhaps most important of all: listen to anyone who wants to have a say about the story and its telling. An honourable exception to the rule of public history: graffiti on the back of the dunny door at Attack Creek in the Northern Territory, contesting the whitefellas’ version, given on a nearby monument, of that celebrated moment in 1860 when John McDouall Stuart’s epic trek across the continent was stopped by “hostile natives.”
All this is work for a Makaratta Commission — in fact it’s hard to see it being done otherwise — and it’s important work. Public history comes from the past; it is the past’s preferred version of itself. But it is active in the present; it is the history curriculum of everyday life. What will it teach? Answering that question comes with added benefits: it could generate listening, thinking and learning in ways that mere telling cannot hope to match.
It comes also with an opportunity to remind the Albanese government that John Howard’s setting of the “practical” against the “symbolic” was disingenuous and self-serving, and so is Labor’s recent toying with Howard’s device. The symbolic matters even when it’s not “practical” (note the effort Howard put into it!), but often it’s practical as well. How could a sea-change in public history not change how First Nations people are seen and see themselves and those around them? And how could that not be “practical” — and we should add, “practical” for our sense of ourselves too?
It would not be a small undertaking, of course. It would big, long and expensive. What might it cost? Perhaps the bidding could start at the half a billion spent on extensions at the Australian War Memorial? Better: why not aim at the total spent by Howard and subsequent Coalition governments on public history installations telling the story we’d already heard over and over again? •
